Blackmailers flourished, and no doubt many queers were haunted by the prospect of the noose and the pillory. Some of the most exposed or most fearful fled from England.
Vere Street was located in Clare Market and the White Swan public house here, owned by James Cooke and others, had been secretly watched. When in the early summer of 1810 it was raided by officers of the court, twenty-three men were arrested – one was a butcher, one was a baker and another a lord. It was reported that the house had a room in which were several beds, a ladies’ changing room, and a ‘chapel’ where marriages were celebrated. The officiating clergyman was one John Church, who was later accused of attempted sodomy, and in a further twist to an already extraordinary story it was reported that his friends had acted out the roles of attendant women and that at a supposed birth a pair of bellows had been used to expel a Cheshire cheese as the newborn. A century before, a wooden doll parodied the infant.
As soon as the cry went up that the men had been taken to Bow Street magistrates’ court, a mob gathered outside the building and ‘such was the fury of the crowd assembled’, according to the Morning Herald, ‘that it was with the utmost difficulty the prisoners could be saved from destruction’.
After they had been found guilty as charged, and before they were dispatched to prison, they were taken to the pillory guarded by one hundred mounted and one hundred unmounted policemen. ‘Poor sods!’ William Beckford, a keen observer of the proceedings, wrote. ‘What a fine ordeal, what a procession, what a pilgrimage, what a song and dance, what a rosary!’ A new pillory had been erected at Temple Bar, and the shops were closed for the occasion. ‘Ammunition wagons’ full of dead cats and turnip heads were driven by butchers’ boys to the route.
By the time the men reached the Temple Bar, they had been punished enough. ‘The first salute received by the offenders,’ according to a contemporary report, ‘was a volley of mud, and a serenade of hisses, hooting and execration, which compelled them to fall flat on their faces.’ By the end of their journey, they resembled ‘bears dipped in a stagnant pool … their faces were completely disfigured by blows and mud; and before they mounted, their whole persons appeared one heap of filth’. It was important to render them as pieces of excrement, in direct or indirect allusion to the physical conditions of their sexuality, so that they themselves became the crime. Two days previously a queer had been treated with equal brutality. A contemporary reported that ‘the head of this wretch when he reached Newgate was compared to a swallow’s nest’.
A pamphlet concerning the affair, The Phoenix of Sodom, or, The Vere Street Coterie (1813), emphasised the secrecy and ubiquity of the vice. ‘How came a man of fortune and of fashion to such a house … even men in sacerdotal garb have descended from the pulpit to the gully-hole of breathing infamy in Vere Street.’ The ‘gully-hole’ is a reference to other holes. This mudbath of horrors was further polluted by the mingling of the classes. ‘Men of rank, and of respectable situations in life, might be seen wallowing in or on the beds with wretches of the lowest description.’ One of these was a chimney sweep and another a ‘nightman’, who swept the shit from the streets, ‘an employment not ill appropriate to the delicate passions of which constitute his amusement’. One respectable gentleman of the City ‘stayed several days and nights together; during which time he generally amused himself with eight, ten and sometimes a dozen different boys and men … It is said that this animal is now in a mad-house.’ The author of the diatribe, Robert Holloway, mentioned one ‘sink’ in Blackman Street off Borough High Street, another by the Obelisk in St George’s Fields and a third in Bishopsgate Street.
William Beckford christened the area around Seven Dials, in the poorest part of London, the ‘Holy Land’ in obvious reference to the waifs and strays who could be purchased there; it does not throw a favourable light upon his character as an exploiter of the poor. He made a similar remark upon Hounslow Heath, an area where he might pick up ‘roughs’; he had declared that he had ‘such favourite ideas about the site of Hounslow that I couldn’t ask for any other Paradise’. Religiosity and sexuality seem to have been strangely confused.
There was another consequence of the Vere Street affair. Two of those taken up at the Swan were a drummer boy and an ensign; they were separately arraigned and convicted towards the end of the year and were both sentenced to be hanged outside the debtors’ door of Newgate prison. It was reported that several prominent individuals were among the crowd watching the spectacle and one of these interested observers, according to The Times, was the Duke of Cumberland, whose valet had been murdered eight months before in what detectives call suspicious circumstances; the unlicensed press suggested that the killing had been used to cover up the duke’s unnatural liaison with another servant. It was reported that ‘the ghost of White, the drummer boy, lately executed for sodomy, pays his nocturnal visits to old Moggy, the rump-rider, Park Street’. The reference is to a queer haunt known as Moggy Stewart’s.
The Duke of Cumberland later became King of Hanover, where he presided over a gay court. Other queers were not so fortunate. Lord Courtenay, who was supposed to have been involved with William Beckford, was strongly advised to depart for France. He had said that none of his fellow peers would convict him because they were ‘like himself’. But he was quickly disabused. No lord would willingly step forward in his defence. He stayed in Paris for the rest of his life.
In 13 January 1811, a university friend of Byron, Charles Skinner Matthews, wrote to the poet that ‘the grand feature, I take it, in the last year of our history, is the enormous increase of paederestia … At no place or time I suppose, since the creation of the world, has sodomy been so rife … every newsp[aper] that one casts one’s eyes upon, presents one with some instance.’ Byron was at the time in Malta, and Matthews adds that ‘what you get for five pounds we must risk our necks for’.
Byron, who had more to fear than most, told his half-sister, Augusta, that ‘even to have such a thing said is utter destruction and ruin to a man, and from which he can never recover’. He himself recollected that ‘I was abused in the public prints, made the common talk of private companies, hissed as I went to the House of Lords, insulted in the streets, afraid to go to the theatre …’ In the autumn of 1816 one sodomite, standing on the scaffold and facing the rope, told his confessor that he wished to make a full confession with names and dates. The worthy Anglican divine, Father Cotton, replied smoothly, ‘My dear Sir, better not, better not.’ Beckford, hearing of this, called the clergyman, ‘stupid, hypocritical, bloodthirsty vermin!’ It was clear that the condemned man was about to name those in high places.
In the same year General Sir Eyre Coote was found guilty of paying the boys of Christ’s Hospital to beat him, and for him to beat them in turn while they were ‘stretched upon a long low table for the purpose’. He sometimes used an instrument and sometimes his bare hand. His military colleagues testified that his behaviour ‘proceeded from insanity alone’. But that did not save him from dishonour; he was removed from the Army List and stripped of the Order of the Bath. The boys themselves were not necessarily innnocents in danger. Public schools were generally believed to ‘wallow in filth’ and the first words that William Makepeace Thackeray heard when entering his dormitory at the age of eleven was ‘Come and frig me’.
One significant figure in the period protested against the general barbarity and hypocrisy of the sodomy laws. Jeremy Bentham’s doctrine of utilitarianism, stripped of its subtleties, asks: what is this action good for? Does it increase the sum of human happiness? He applied these questions to the sodomy laws of England in the full and certain belief that he would be attacked and slandered. ‘Miscreant!’ he imagined his opponents screaming, ‘you are one of them then!’ In 1774 he had written some notes on reform of the law, citing precedents from the Enlightenment and classical antiquity. By 1818 he had composed a 500-page treatise in which he urged that the morally slandered men and women of England should be left alone. The ‘bonds o
f attachment’ in male love are good and useful in their own right. What is bad, useless and reprehensible is the amount of cruelty, violence and mischief perpetrated against same-sex lovers. He described one hanging judge; ‘delight and exultation glistened in his countenance, his looks called for applause and congratulations at the hands of the surrounding audience’. It is a vision worthy of Fuseli.
Bentham argued with his own abrasive good sense. ‘It seems rather too much to subscribe to men’s being hanged to save the indecency of enquiring whether they deserve it … do not exhaust your invention to belabour it with hard names but point out and ascertain with calmness and perspicuity the specie and proportion of misery it occasions.’ He stated, perhaps for the first time, that sodomy ‘is a crime, if a crime it is to be called, that produces no misery in society’. He added that ‘bad taste is a very bad reason for a man’s being thrust into perdition with the vilest, and that to thirst after a man’s blood who is innocent, if innocence consists in the doing of no harm to anyone, is a much worse taste’.
To utter such sentiments in public would be to throw into jeopardy all his moral, social and philosophical work. If he touched the subject he would do so, as he said, ‘with a halter about his neck’. His work was never published in his lifetime.
It is extremely unlikely, however, that if it had been published it would have made the slightest difference to the rigour of the law. The appetite for sensation and the desire for punishment were so strong that no force on earth could have withstood them.
In 1822 the Bishop of Clogher entertained and excited public discourse. On the evening of Friday 19 July a young soldier in the Foot Guards, John Moverley, entered the White Lion Tavern in Charles Street off the Haymarket before taking a pint of porter into the back parlour. He was joined a few minutes later by the Bishop of Clogher, dressed in his clerical garb. The good bishop had a history. He was a prominent member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
The presence of the bishop and the soldier aroused the suspicions of the landlord and his son. They crept around the back and, through a window, saw the two men engaged in some kind of sexual activity. It is not clear from the record who was buggering whom. The landlord called together his customers and they all burst into the parlour where cleric and soldier had their breeches around their ankles. The watch was called.
On their journey to the watch-house the two men were manhandled by the mob who jeered at them and tore their clothes. It was not often the crowd had a bishop in its clutches. It seems that he was still wearing gentlemanly clerical garb because he had come directly from the House of Lords.
The following morning, at the Marlborough Street police station, both men refused to reveal their identities. But the bishop managed to scribble a note to a dependant. ‘John – come to me directly, don’t say who I am, but I am undone.’ The relevant sureties were given for the bishop and, since he had been given professional advice while in custody, he was granted bail of one thousand pounds without revealing his name. The soldier was somehow spirited away the next day so that he might avoid interrogation. Yet no secret lasts in London. Soon it became common knowledge that the Lord Bishop of Clogher was a bugger. It also became clear that he had been allowed to escape the law by means of a sizeable bail, emphasising the fact that even in the case of sodomy two laws were practised – one for the rich and the other for the poor. A squib was circulated.
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He bated his hook with a Frenchman’s arse
And pulled up the bishop of Clogher.
Clogher became known as the ‘Arse-Bishop’. He fled to Paris, but ended his life as an anonymous butler in Edinburgh. The private secretary to Robert Peel, then the home secretary, took a more sober view of the fiasco. ‘No event in the last century,’ he wrote, ‘is more to be lamented both on private and public grounds – it will sap the very foundation of society …’
It was possibly as a result of the Clogher scandal that the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, committed suicide by cutting his throat. It was widely believed and reported that the severe anxiety and overwork, which were then the inevitable lot of the ministers of the Crown, had turned his wits, causing what at a later date would be called a ‘nervous breakdown’. He had indeed broken down, but perhaps not for the reasons provided.
It seems that he was tormented by the belief that he was being, or was about to be, blackmailed for homosexuality. He was under the delusion (if it was indeed a delusion) that he had been seen entering a male brothel. He was marked out. He would never be clean again; he would never be safe again. He is reported to have confessed his sexual indiscretions to his physician, to his wife, and to a society hostess, Harriet Arbuthnot. In his mania he told the king that he was being accused of Clogher’s crime, and George IV became concerned for the minister’s sanity. Some peculiarities emerged. Castlereagh insisted that he was being blackmailed but resisted any advice to inform the police; he wanted to spare his wife the indignity, although eventually he committed the greater shame of self-murder. It remains an open question, not helped by the fact that his corpse was jeered when it was laid in Westminster Abbey. It is likely that Castlereagh wished to avoid an explosive political scandal at the cost of his own life.
It was well known that any case of sodomy involving those of a higher social class attracted large crowds to the courtrooms. Many in the dock tried hard to conceal their rank by dressing as footmen, servants or labourers, and used every legal means to avoid revealing their true identity. As one solicitor put it, ‘you have a name given, and there is not a particle of evidence that this is not the real name of the prisoner. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, you are bound to suppose that the prisoner has given his real name.’ The more wealthy suspects might also bribe the penny-a-line court reporters to conceal their names.
Soldiers were not only in demand from bishops. Guardsmen were known to congregate at the White Lion Tavern. Soldiers released from duty on Horse Guards Parade were accustomed to meeting at the Rose and Crown in St Martin’s Lane, as well as the Bull and the Barley Mow in the Strand. The evenings in the Barley Mow were known as ‘free and easies’, where soldiers and clients danced cheek to cheek. The soldiers from Knightsbridge Barracks also frequented the local pubs for passing trade, while another barracks provided the attraction for a trysting place in Orange Street just behind the newly built National Gallery.
A correspondent of Havelock Ellis amplified the reports by noting that ‘choirboys reinforce the ranks to a considerable extent, and private soldiers to a large extent. Some of the barracks (notably Knightsbridge) are great centres. On summer evenings Hyde Park and the neighbourhood of Albert Gate is full of guardsmen and others plying a lively trade, and with little disguise, in uniform or out … It is worth noting that there is a perfect understanding in this matter between soldiers and the police, who may always be relied upon by the former for assistance and advice.’ It is not clear what assistance or advice was required.
The small alleys between Orange Street and Trafalgar Square became notorious to the extent that one man in the vicinity was deemed to have been ‘roaming about for some unexplained motive’ suggesting that ‘his conduct is in that respect suspicious’. Some areas became so popular in the early years of the nineteenth century that placards were pasted on the walls. ‘Beware of Sods!’ If a customer wished to avoid the inconvenience of casual encounters, a famous brothel of underage boys could be found in Spitalfields during the early 1830s. Boys were also placed for auction under the railway viaduct in White Street; the curls beside their ears were known as ‘Newgate knockers’.
The largest incidence of crime relating to sexual matters, in the early nineteenth century, was concerned with extortion and blackmail. In an age of suspicion it was the most profitable. A Threatening Letters Act was passed in 1825 but there was never an end to accusers.
One of the most curious cases involved pic
ture-shop windows. John Muirhead, a queer who was nevertheless a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, struck up a conversation with a young man outside a shop that displayed sporting prints and other memorabilia; one remark led to another, and it so happened that Muirhead always carried in his pocket prints of a licentious nature which were the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of dirty photographs. He also took out two ‘skins’, or condoms, and asked the young man if he could fill them. At a later date he took three boys to the second floor of an oyster shop where he took advantage of their inflamed passions by showing them ‘prints of the most indecent and shocking nature’ before having his way with them. On one of his forays a print-shop owner in Holywell Street dangled a print of the Bishop of Clogher through the window in front of him, in order to scare him away, but the gesture had no effect. Muirhead was eventually arrested and sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment.
He could not have chosen more satisfactory premises for his dirty prints. Holywell Street, off the Strand, was well known for its indecent and pornographic works, many of which concerned gay sex. There were supposed to be fifty-seven pornography shops in as many yards, perhaps an exaggeration, and the Daily Telegraph condemned the sight of young people of both sexes ‘furtively peering in at these sin-crammed shop windows’.
Other, better connected, men were allowed to evade the consequences of the law. William Bankes, the Member of Parliament for Dorset, was in 1833 found ‘standing behind the screen of a place for making water against Westminster Abbey walls, in company with a soldier named Flower, and of having been surprised with his breeches and braces unbuttoned at ten at night, his companion’s dress being in similar disorder’. After a parade of eminent witnesses testified on his behalf the MP was found to be not guilty. The foreman of the jury stated that Bankes left the court without a stain – to which an observer added ‘on his shirt’. The fate of Flower is unknown. But eight years later Bankes was arrested in a similar situation, with a guardsman in Green Park; he left the country.
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